Shows & Exhibitions

Visitors to the Mile High City can lose themselves in the intergalactic funhouse that is Convergence Station, the third permanent exhibition from art collective-turned-multimillion-dollar arts production company Meow Wolf.
Nestled on an oddly-shaped lot between two arms of freeway overpasses, the new immersive art attraction fills a 90,000-square-foot custom-built facility, with four floors of interactive art installations that promise hours of exploration. (For context: it’s larger than both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.)
Founded by a group of young artists in Santa Fe in 2008, Meow Wolf got $3.5 million in funding from Game of Thrones author and local resident George R.R. Martin to open its first permanent location in 2016. The House of Eternal Return was an immediate sensation, drawing crowds eager to experience—and take photos amid—its immersive environment of what appears at first glance to be an abandoned family home, but is somehow tied to portals to other dimensions.
The project’s success presaged the explosion of interest in immersive experiences, which in recent years have multiplied worldwide and become the most popular way for the general public to experience arts and culture.
Meow Wolf launched ambitious plans to expand to other cities around the country, and a second location, Las Vegas’s Omega Mart, opened in February of this year. (The pandemic scuttled outposts in Washington, D.C., and Phoenix, but the founders promised Artnet News that other ventures are on the horizon.)
A room by Andrea Thurber at Meow Wolf Convergence Station, Denver. Photo by Kennedy Cottrell.
Like its predecessors, Convergence Station is more than an art show. It’s a world unto itself—or four of them, to be precise, each representing a parallel universe that, as the lore goes, merged during a mysterious cosmic event back in 1994. There’s an frozen planet trapped in a 1,000-year ice age, a trash-filled city, a mysterious network of catacombs, and a six-dimensional being taking the form of a cavern that calls to mind Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock.
The installations are all constructed around Meow Wolf’s elaborate, Marvel-style mythology. According to the lore, the Quantum Department of Transportation, or Q-DOT, opened the Convergence Station as a tourist destination for intergalactic travelers. But mysterious weather events called memory storms forced it to shut down. The memories of denizens of all four lands have fragmented and scattered, and the resulting free-floating “mems” have become a valuable form of currency in the Converged Worlds.
Should you wish to explore this complicated backstory, you can get a Q Pass card (which will either be free or cost $1) and tap into the Convergence Exchange Network devices. Piecing together matching mems will reveal short pieces of animated content that begin to unfold the backstory of the characters and the deeper mystery of how the convergence came to be. More

For the first time in nearly 20 years, the late Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell is the subject of a major U.S. museum show, bringing together more than 80 canvases at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The show, organized with the support of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, opens with a pair of Mitchell’s student works, painted in a Cubist style right after her graduation from the Art Institute of Chicago while she was visiting Paris, where she would move permanently in 1959.
One of those canvases, Figure and the City (1949–50), “was a touchstone for us,” Sarah Roberts, SFMOMA’s head of painting and sculpture, told Artnet News during a tour of the show. “Mitchell said that when she painted it, she knew it was going to be the last figurative painting she ever made. And it was very much about the psychology and the mood of the figure, and the landscape around her.”
Not long after came Mitchell’s breakthrough period, and the works that established her as a key member of the New York School of painters.
Joan Mitchell, Untitled (1948). Photo by Kris Graves, collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation, ©estate of Joan Mitchell, courtesy of Cheim and Read, New York.
“There’s transition for every artist from being a student or a young person to being a full-fledged artist,” Katy Siegel, senior programming and research curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, told Artnet News. “Where Mitchell finds herself is incredibly thrilling, so the declarativeness and definitiveness of a work like To the Harbormaster [1957], which is so ambitious in scale, is really important.”
From the start of Mitchell’s career, her self-assurance as an artist was clear, and she seemed to be comfortable expressing her power in a variety of ways.
“She was an athletic genius. She was not only a diver and and horseback rider, Mitchell was an actual champion figure skater,” Siegel said. “Her confidence in her physicality, her ability to move big paintings by herself, to really navigate a very large canvas, that is really unusual.”
Joan Mitchell, To the Harbormaster (1957). Photo by Tony Prikryl; AKSArt LP; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Roberts and Siegel co-curated the exhibition, which was originally slated to debut at the Baltimore Museum in 2020. (It will now be the show’s second venue.) Plans for “Joan Mitchell” to travel to the Guggenheim in New York had to be scrapped when lockdowns scrambled exhibition calendars. Instead, it will head to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris next fall.
The show coincides with an ongoing resurgence of interest in Mitchell’s work and her place in the Ab-Ex movement. The show was announced in 2018, during the Art Basel fair in Switzerland, where around $70 million worth of art by Mitchell was on offer. The artist also set a new $16.6 million auction record that month, according to the Artnet Price Database.
But even with the recent market surge—which made insuring the show a far more complicated prospect, according to organizers—Mitchell’s work is “still undervalued, in my opinion,” Roberts said. In comparison, Franz Kline’s work has fetched up to $40.4 million at auction; Jackson Pollock, $58.36 million; Willem de Kooning, $68.9 million.
More important for the curators, however, is that any rise in Mitchell’s market be matched by an increase in scholarly interest in her more than four-decade career, which, like that of so many other women artists, was for a time largely written out of the art historical canon.
Joan Mitchell, Petit Matin (1982). Photo by Ian Lefebvre; private collection; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
“There are so many stories that need to be told by museums, for women artists, artists of color, LGBTQ artists. With Mitchell, here is an artist who is a woman who is a really great artist, no questions asked, no equivocations. That’s what we wanted to do with the show first and foremost,” Siegel said. “If one of the ways that gets expressed is the market, that’s fine, but that’s the least interesting way.”
Despite the obstacles faced by women artists of her era, Mitchell remained an integral part of the Abstract Expressionist movement. “In 1950, Mitchell comes back to New York [from Paris] and she immediately starts showing,” Roberts said. “The labeling of her as ‘Second Generation’ is such a disservice, because she was very much there and being shown and discussed and respected and part of the conversation. They only apply that term to women and artists of color.”
“There’s a very specific understanding of Mitchell in the United States that is completely rooted in that New York, early 1950s, Ab-Ex moment,” Roberts added. “People look at the rest of her work as either a tailing off from that high point, or they discuss it in the same terminology when it radically changes.”
Joan Mitchell, Vétheuil (1967–68). Photo by Brian Buckley; courtesy of Joan Mitchell Catalogue Raisonne; private collection; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
“We wanted to unmoor her from the 1950s, and put the different parts of her career together to tell a Transatlantic story,” Siegel added.
Siegel and Roberts hope that the show will underscore Mitchell’s undeniable artistic genius—but they also acknowledge her dark side.
“Mitchell was a difficult person. Anyone you talked to would will tell you stories of fights, her saying unconscionably unkind things to people. She was an alcoholic, and not a nice one, so she alienated a lot of people over the course of her life,” Roberts said. “But you will also find people, particularly younger artists, to whom she was very nurturing. She was a very complicated person.”
Joan Mitchell, Sans neige (1969). Collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, purchased with funds provided by the Hillman Foundation; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
To help paint a more complete picture of the artist’s career outside of that highly visible New York moment, the curators sought out rarely exhibited works by Mitchell, such as Sans neige (1969). The 16.5-foot-wide painting was her first large-scale triptych, and it hasn’t been shown since the late 1970s, when the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh decided that the student library wasn’t the safest place to display a work of such magnitude.
“It had been in storage ever since,” Roberts said. “It needed some treatment, but the museum rallied their team and resources, and heroically got the painting ready to travel.”
The work illustrates the importance of landscape in Mitchell’s abstract visual language—a factor to which she had been attuned since her Chicago childhood, when she grew up in a tower overlooking Lake Michigan.
Joan Mitchell, My Landscape II (1967). Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, Martha Jackson Memorial Collection; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
“Mitchell talked throughout her entire life about how formative the wind, the weather, the light, the color, and the constant changing of the lake was to her sense of landscape and to her visual intelligence,” Roberts said.
This influence becomes more pronounced in the second half of the show, with works made in France in the 1970s and ’80s, inspired by everything from Paris Metro stations to sailing on the Mediterranean with her long-time partner Jean-Paul Riopelle. (He documented those trips in home movies, a snippet of which plays on loop in the gallery.)
The exhibition is arranged chronologically, following Mitchell across the decades. “We wanted to tell the story of Mitchell’s art from Mitchell’s perspective, as she experienced it, in suites or cycles of work,” Siegel said.
There’s the moment when Mitchell and Riopelle put a final end to their fraught 20-year relationship, and she responds with La Vie en rose (1979), a four-panel masterpiece measuring more than 22 feet wide.
Joan Mitchell, La Vie en Rose (1979). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, anonymous gift and purchase, George A. Hearn Fund, by exchange; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
“It’s an incredibly tough, but very ambitious declaration of independence and philosophy and mourning and grief all at the same time,” Roberts said.
“As a woman alone, she’s really rising to the occasion and making paintings at a scale that she’s never made before,” Siegel agreed.
The exhibition ends with works made just months before the artist’s death, from lung cancer in 1992. The powerful paintings clearly show Mitchell still exploring new ideas on massive canvases despite her illness.
“Mitchell knowns she’s not in great health, and she knows her time is limited, and she’s really fully herself,” Siegel said.
Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers (1990–91). Photo by Brian Buckley; courtesy of Joan Mitchell Catalogue Raisonne; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
“She keeps trying new things and pushing herself, and you see that right to the end,” Roberts added.
In the early stages of planning, the curators hoped to include as many as 125 pieces, including a large selection of Mitchell’s works on paper. In the end, the scope proved somewhat narrower.
“We couldn’t do everything,” Siegel said. “We hope that this overview is definitive when it comes to the big picture of Mitchell, but there’s so much more to do.”
“Joan Mitchell” is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art September 4, 2021–January 17, 2022. It will travel to the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, Maryland, March 6, 2022—August 14, 2022; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, 8 Av. du Mahatma Gandhi, 75116 Paris, France, fall 2022. 
Joan Mitchell, La Ligne de la rupture (1970–71). Photo by Clint Jenkins; private collection; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, City Landscape (1955). Photo by Aimee Marshall the Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Society for Contemporary American Art, ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, Ode to Joy (A Poem by Frank O’Hara) 1970–71. Photo by Biff Henrich for ING_INK, Buffalo, New York; collection of University at Buffalo Art Galleries, gift of Rebecca Anderson; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, Rock Bottom (1960). Collection of the Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin, gift of Mari and James A. Michener; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, The Bridge (1956). Photo by Kris Graves; Fredriksen Family Art Collection; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, Untitled (1973). Photo by Brian Buckley for Joan Mitchell Catalogue Raisonne; private collection; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, No Birds (1987–88). Photo by Kris Graves, ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, Untitled (1992). Photo courtesy of Cheim and Read, New York, Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg Collection, ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, Lyric (1951). Photo by Chip Porter; collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, gift of William Rubin; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, Bracket (1989). Photo by Katherine Du Tiel; the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, No Rain (1976). Collection the Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of the estate of Joan Mitchell; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
Joan Mitchell, Weeds (1976). Photo by Ian Lefebvre for the Art Gallery of Ontario; collection of irshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn; ©estate of Joan Mitchell.
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For Gallery Weekend Berlin, it seems the second time’s the charm. This year, the event decided to split off into two separate iterations, in April and September, in part to uplift galleries at a time of great uncertainty over fair calendar, but also because its usual spring slot has, for the past two years, coincided with significant health restrictions in the city.
The weekend city-wides series of exhibitions is normally a time when out-of-town collectors bop around the sprawled-out city’s galleries in event-sponsored BMWs. Over the years, dealers have tended to report strong sales relative to the low cost of staging presentations from the comfort of their own galleries.
And though this year was markedly different, moods remained high. Collectors from within Europe—and at least one from China—passed through the city-wide event on their way to Art Basel, which is opening today. The timing proved a little tight for German dealers trying to head there early to install at the fair’s Unlimited or Parcours sections this past weekend. Because most dealers had to leave, participants convinced Gallery Weekend to close on Sunday, a day earlier than originally planned.
Thornton Dial’s All the Cats in Town (1993) at Société.
Despite the hurdles, the event this week had an air of triumph. Most of the 47 participating galleries followed the brief to present a so-called “discovery” position—giving space, an increasingly precious commodity in Berlin, to younger or emerging artists (with lower price points, usually) who have a bent towards experimentation.
Germany-based artists were among the most exciting presentations, including Brook Hsu, who showed moody green-hued paintings at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. At Esther Schipper, newly represented Berlin-based artist Cemile Sahin considered her Kurdish migrant background with a contemporary reflection on the treaty of Sèvres, which redrew borders after World War I and deconstructed the Ottoman Empire (one of the works was bought by the Bundeskunsthalle, Germany’s federal art collection and exhibition space).
At Guido W. Baudach, the young German artist Jasmin Werner, considered the strange saga of the Palast der Republik, the former East German seat of government that was destroyed to make way for the Humboldt Forum. (The building’s remains were sold off to Dubai to become a part of the Burj Khalifa.)
Cemille Sahin. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin. Photo © Andrea Rossetti.
The gallery Société opted not to show a discovery per se, but an artist long overlooked in Europe, the Alabama-born painter Thornton Dial, who died in 2016. Working with the artist’s estate, David Lewis Gallery, and Souls Grown Deep Foundation, the gallery managed to bring half a dozen large, sculptural canvases comprised of materials from everyday life in America.
On the whole, the city was in a discovery mode: An election is underway, which means a whole new host of politicians will begin to shape the city’s fragile cultural landscape—and top museum positions were filled last week, including by Klaus Biesenbach, who is taking the reins at Neue Nationalgalerie. In the meantime, the city teeters is on a precipice, gridlocked by a lack of space, be it homes, studios, or gallery spaces.
See images of the exhibitions below.
Courtesy the artist & Galerie Guido W. Baudach. Photo: Roman März
Robert Rehfeldt, Installation view at ChertLudde during Gallery Weekend, September 2021. Photo by Stefan Korte.
Christophe Aque, Installation view at Sweetwater during Gallery Weekend, September 2021, Photo by Stefan Korte.
Win McCarthy, Installation view at Galerie Neu during Gallery Weekend, September 2021, Photo by Stefan Korte.
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For her debut exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, New York City-based artist Avery Singer has cemented her place as one of the most in-demand young artists working today—and, at 34, the youngest artist on the blue-chip gallery’s roster.
Singer’s series of 14 paintings line the walls of the gallery’s second- and fifth-floor and show off the Singer’s deft blending of analog and digital, combining disparate narratives and themes. A bona fide art star whose work has been heralded at the Venice Biennale and is coveted at auction, Singer has clearly hit her stride.
In the works on view, some of which are noted as being “studies,” Singer’s intensive, layered process is clear. Each canvas becomes a portal to tapping into the hive mind, where references to art history and internet memes sit cheek to jowl, and it’s easy to imagine references to artists as diverse as Keith Haring and M.C. Escher, Bunny Rogers and Sarah Sze, Julie Mehretu and Giorgio Morandi buzzing about.
One of the new works, China Chalet (2021), eulogizes the erstwhile “unassuming dim sum restaurant” that doubled as a sweaty den of iniquity for the young and restless denizens of lower Manhattan. The fractured work has a lot of White Claw cans, iPhones, and what looks to be a prescription pill bottle.
Avery Singer, China Chalet (2021). Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin.© Avery Singer Photo: Lance Brewer.
Another work, titled Wojak Battle Scene, features the meme-ified Feels Guy, a sad bald man who entered a certain corner of Internet culture in the early 2010s.
According to former Artnet News columnist Nate Freeman, Singer’s larger canvases carried a price tag of a cool $1.2 million. Singer remains the most expensive millennial artist—and Marc Payot told Vanity Fair that interest remains high, noting “it’s not a question of if we sell but when we sell.”
“Avery Singer: Reality Ender” is on view at Hauser & Wirth through October 30. See more images from the show, below.
Installation view “Avery Singer. Reality Ender” at Hauser & Wirth, New York. Picturing: Studio (2019); Sculptor (2021); and Wojack Battle Scene (2021). © Avery Singer, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Lance Brewer.
Avery Singer, Happening (2021). Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin.© Avery Singer Photo: Lance Brewer.
Avery Singer, Sculptor (2021). Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin.© Avery Singer Photo: Lance Brewer.
Installation view “Avery Singer. Reality Ender” at Hauser & Wirth, New York. Picturing: Studio (2019) and Sculptor ( 2021). © Avery Singer, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Lance Brewer.
Installation view, “Avery SInger. Reality Ender” at Hauser & Wirth New York. Picturing: Side Quest (2021); Sculptor (Study) (2021); Sculptor (2021); and Happening (2021). © Avery Singer, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Lance Brewer.
Installation view “Avery Singer. Reality Ender” at Hauser & Wirth, New York. Picturing: Studio (2019); Sculptor (2021); and Wojack Battle Scene (2021). © Avery Singer, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Lance Brewer.
Installation view “Avery Singer. Reality Ender” at Hauser & Wirth, New York. Picturing: Technique (2021); China Chalet (2021); and Edgelord (2021). © Avery Singer, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Lance Brewer.
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Earlier this year, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, and Naomi Osaka as co-hosts of the Met Gala, it signaled a new phase in American celebrity culture. After all, the actor, singer, poet laureate, and athlete are all under the age of 30—the faces of a generation defined by its activism.
Just days after the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks, and on the same day as the House Foreign Relations Committee grilled top brass on the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the timing of this year’s Costume Institute show was, in a word, fraught. This was proven when a cadre of demonstrators crashed the tony step-and-repeat—not to mention the fact that a slew of the evening’s guests chose to wear non-American designers.
Nonetheless, the much-anticipated return to in-person red-carpet events was a sight to behold, kicking off a two-part exhibition at the Met. It will open to the public later this week, on a staggered timeline: part one, titled “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” runs from September 18, 2021 through September 5, 2022; and part two, “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” will run from May 5, 2022 through September 5, 2022.
Back in April, the Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton told Vogue that U.S.-centric exhibitions were a long time coming; the last show to home in on the topic was “American Ingenuity” in 1998, and in the intervening years, the fashion industry—as well as the political, social, and cultural realms—have all undergone a serious recalculation.
“I really do believe that American fashion is undergoing a Renaissance,” Bolton told the magazine. “I think young designers in particular are at the vanguard of discussions about diversity and inclusion, as well as sustainability and transparency, much more so than their European counterparts, maybe with the exception of the English designers.”
Andre Walker’s Pendleton Woolen Mills coat, Spring/Summer 2018. Courtesy of Andre Walker Studio. Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibition, in the Anna Wintour Costume Center, is based around the framework of a house, with each imagined room representing a feeling that corresponds to the spirit of a particular garment or runway collection.
The porch, Bolton explained, is categorized by warmth and visualized through a blanket-coat that Andre Walker designed with Pendleton Woolen Mills, paying homage to the Oregon-based company that was founded in 1863. And in the garden room, Oscar de la Renta’s floral-festooned dresses—over the years favored by Taylor Swift and Wintour herself—represent joy and rebirth.
Below, see more images from “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.”
Ensemble, Fall/Winter 1982-83 Ralph Lauren. Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Nostalgia (right) and Belonging (left). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Consciousness. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sterling Ruby Studio, VEIL FLAG (2020). Courtesy of Sterling Ruby Studio. Photo: Melanie Schiff.
Gallery view, Belonging. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Delight. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Assurance. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ensemble, Donna Karan Fall/Winter 1985-86. Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Wonder (left) and Warmth (right). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Wonder. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery view, Comfort. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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As museums begin to reopen in the United States, we cast an eye over upcoming exhibitions for those that promise the most urgent and notable art of our time. The resulting list contains a diverse roster of 14 shows—by solo practitioners and groups chosen by keen-eyed curators—coming to museums from coast to coast.
Some exhibitions will introduce you to artists you may not know, like Bani Abidi at the MCA Chicago, Michaela Eichwald at the Walker Art Center, and Nellie Mae Rowe at the High Museum. Others will offer new insight into artists or eras of artistic production you thought you knew, from a spotlight on Georgia O’Keeffe’s photography in Houston to a sweeping feminist art survey in Berkeley. 
Regardless of what city you’re in, this fall’s season of museum programming is bound to open both eyes and minds.

“New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century”Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)August 28, 2021–January 30, 2022
Farah Al Qasimi, It’s Not Easy Being Seen 3 (2016). Courtesy the artist; The Third Line, Dubai; and Helena Anrather.
With 140 works by 76 artists and collectives, this exhibition at the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is one of the largest to date on contemporary feminist art, and will coincide with a year of public programming focused on feminist theory. Works by the likes of Laura Aguilar, Christina Quarles, Zanele Muholi, Wu Tsang, and Francesca Woodman are included, tackling such topics as the fragmented body, domesticity, female anger, and feminist utopias. 

“Raúl de Nieves: The Treasure House of Memory”Institute of Contemporary Art, BostonSeptember 1, 2021–July 24, 2022
Raúl de Nieves, The Fable, which is composed of wonders, moves the more (2021). © Raúl de Nieves.
Multidisciplinary artist Raúl de Nieves is adored for his exuberant works that blend queer club culture, religious iconography, and folklore traditions from his native Mexico. Here, the artist continues his ongoing exploration of his culture and its traditions through a new body of work, created especially for the ICA, that looks at memory and personal transformation.

“Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe”High Museum of Art, AtlantaSeptember 3, 2021–January 9, 2022 
Nellie Mae Rowe, This World is Not My Home (1979). Photo courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Born in Georgia in 1900, the daughter of a formerly enslaved man, Rowe achieved fame as a self-taught folk artist. The first major exhibition devoted to Rowe in more than 20 years celebrates the late artist’s notable drawing career, which was only fostered later in her life, after the deaths of her husband and employer, in the 1960s. The museum bills the show as the first to position Rowe’s creative pursuit as a “radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South.”

Joan MitchellSan Francisco Museum of Modern ArtSeptember 4, 2021–January 17, 2022
Joan Mitchell, Untitled (1992). Courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York.
This highly anticipated retrospective devoted to the queen of gestural abstraction contains over 80 works, encompassing everything from early paintings and drawings, sketchbooks, letters, and photographs to the large, color-drenched, multi-panel works that defined her later output.  

“Selena Forever/Siempre Selena”Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, ArkansasSeptember 4, 2021–January 10, 2022
John Dyer, Selena (1992). Courtesy of the artist.
At the height of the beloved Tejano singer’s fame, it was photographer John Dyer whom she entrusted to produce the images of her that were seared into the American pop-culture consciousness. Over the course of two collaborative photoshoots, in 1992 and ‘94, Dyer captured the legendary Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in her signature gemmed bustier and red lip, pictures that became immortal after her tragic death in 1995.

“Bani Abidi: The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared”Museum of Contemporary Art, ChicagoSeptember 4, 2021–June 5, 2022
Bani Abidi, An Unforeseen Situation 4. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Bani Abidi’s work infuses deadly serious subjects like militarism, nationalism, and memory with humor, holding up a mirror to power structures. The Pakistani artist, who lives in Karachi and Berlin, gets the survey treatment at the MCA, co-organized with the Sharjah Art Foundation, in a show that looks at over 20 years of her career and features new work alongside existing video, photography, and sound installations. 

“Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?”Museum of Modern Art, New YorkSeptember 18, 2021–January 30, 2022
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist.
Pendleton, who has put forth a “Black Dada” framework inspired by Amiri Baraka, ambitiously takes over MoMA’s Marron Atrium with an immersive floor-to-ceiling installation described as a “spatial collage” containing text, image, and sound. All together, the show’s paintings, drawings, textiles, sculptures, and moving images seek to disrupt the 1:1 relationship of words and images, allowing a complex new vision of Blackness to emerge in abstraction.

“Barbara Kruger: THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.”The Art Institute of ChicagoSeptember 19, 2021–January 24, 2022
Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) (1989), at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2013. Photo by Susan Broman via Flickr.
The prolific Pictures Generation artist has collaborated with the Art Institute to map out a survey of her entire career that takes up the whole of the museum’s 18,000-square-foot gallery space. It’s all here, and squirm-inducingly relevant: her trademark “pasteups,” works on vinyl, animations, and video installations, plus a new site-specific work in the adjoining atrium. On top of this, Kruger has created work for the city at large, making billboards and designs for the Chicago Transit Authority, among other organizations.

“Naudline Pierre: What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared”Dallas Museum of ArtSeptember 26, 2021–May 15, 2022
Naudline Pierre, Lest You Fall (2019). Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art.
Pierre is known for her colorful canvases that depict ethereal beings and explore power struggles in intimate relationships. The Brooklyn-based painter’s first solo museum exhibition will consist of existing works—one of which was recently acquired by the DMA—as well as new creations, with five major paintings making their debut. 

“Greater New York”MoMA PS1, New YorkOctober 7, 2021–April 18, 2022
Robin Graubard, selection from “Peripheral Vision” (1979–2021). Image courtesy the artist and Office Baroque, Antwerp.
One of the hottest survey exhibitions of new art from across New York’s five boroughs is back for its fifth iteration. This latest edition, curated by Ruba Katrib with Serubiri Moses, Kate Fowle, and Inés Katzenstein, was delayed by a year due to the pandemic, but still promises to showcase the best of artists and collectives currently working in the Big Apple, including Carolyn Lazard, Alan Michelson, and BlackMass publishing.

“Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer”Museum of Fine Arts, HoustonOctober 17, 2021–January 17, 2022
Georgia O’Keeffe, Jimsonweed (Datura stramonium) (1964–68). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe.
The artist best known for her paintings of flowers and Southwestern landscapes is recast here in the first exhibition to focus entirely on her photography, with nearly 100 prints from a newly examined archive to go on view. Described as a “Modernist approach” to the art form, O’Keeffe’s pictures document family members, fellow artists, and her travels. 

“Soft Water Hard Stone”The New Museum, New YorkOctober 28, 2021–January 23, 2022
Amalie Smith, Clay Theory (2019) (still). Courtesy of the artist.
The latest triennial from the downtown institution draws its title from a Brazilian proverb: “Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura,” meaning “soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole.” Curators Margot Norton and Jamillah James have translated this idea into an exhibition of 41 international artists focused on how systems we once considered infallible have been, in fact, proven fragile by recent global crises. 

My BarbarianWhitney Museum of American Art, New YorkOctober 29, 2021–February 27, 2022
My Barbarian, Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater, 2011–15. Studio photograph, courtesy of the artists.
For the occasion of the performance trio’s 20th anniversary, the Whitney has commissioned a new filmic piece, Rose Bird, about California’s first female chief Supreme Court justice, to accompany this two-part survey of My Barbarian’s work. A series of live events—including a play, a festival, a cabaret-style concert, and a “rehearsal-as-performance”―will be enacted alongside an exhibition containing footage of previous performances, in addition to sculptures, paintings, drawings, masks, and puppets.

Michaela EichwaldWalker Art Center, MinneapolisNovember 14, 2020–May 16, 2021
Michaela Eichwald, Die Unsrigen sind fortgezogen (The Ours Have Moved Away) (2014). Collection Brian Pietsch and Christopher Hermann.
The Berlin-based artist and writer, who is primarily a painter, marks her first solo exhibition in the United States with a presentation looking back at the past ten years of her career. Her palimpsest-like paintings, sculptures, and collages contain surprising materials like candy and chicken bones, and often allude to her interests in philosophy and literature.
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One does not expect the first big New York fall art show one attends to be Banksy, but the Art Gods will have their say. 
Just hours before the remnants of Hurricane Ida steamrolled the New York region, I made my way to an exhibition space on 14th Street, near a Foot Locker and a Pinkberry, for the sprawling show “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” The traveling exhibition (one of several currently making the rounds) offers a deluge of some 100 prints by the famed street artist, whose guerrilla works—sometimes politically incisive, sometimes absurdly humorous, sometimes just cute—have captivated a mass audience for years. The show contains a VR experience, a video montage of the anonymous artist’s works, and scene-setting flourishes like a mock British phone booth. 
The artist is not amused by these tributes. When the show appeared in Moscow in 2018, his responses, in an Instagram post, included “What’s the opposite of LOL?” He disavowed the show, saying, “I don’t charge people to see my art unless there’s a fairground wheel.” Tickets to the New York presentation cost $29.50, or $19.90 for kids; to date, it has drawn over 3 million visitors in 15 cities…you do the math. (Banksy’s post did, however, acknowledge the irony of criticizing unauthorized presentations of his unauthorized works.)
The show is organized in cooperation with Banksy dealer Andrew Lilley; a great many of the prints are from his holdings. Helpfully, if you’re feeling acquisitive, the wall labels point you to his website. And the spectacle is produced by Exhibition Hub and Fever, which between them offer exhibitions on artists like Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt, and Michael Jackson. Probably Fever’s best known offering would be “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” which got them in hot water with New York’s Better Business Bureau when customers confused it with “Immersive Van Gogh,” the Emily in Paris one.
Installation view of the immersive (and unauthorized) Banksy exhibition “Genius or Vandal.” Photo courtesy of Erick Pendzich.
Girding myself for what press reps promised was a “family-friendly storytelling experience,” I headed first to the VR presentation. To a politely funky soundtrack, I floated through grit-dusted alleyways, where animated Banksys pop up on the graffitied walls as if being painted live. The 10-minute voyage packs in the works, and they go by too fast. This sets the tone for an overstocked show that screams “I’m a blockbuster!” 
Some of the displays are clever enough. At the entry, the organizers—admitting that they can’t offer the conventional biography—provide the next best thing: a recreation of the artist’s studio from his hit 2010 mockumentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. But it faces off with the show’s worst sin, a curtained room with a blaring videomontage, complete with grating soundtrack (sirens and police radios, get it?), of numerous works connected by red string in the classic evidence board motif. The sound drowns out thought in the neighboring galleries. 
All the hits are here, represented by the prints the artist makes to complement his wall works in the wild—Girl with a Balloon, Riot Copper, Monkey Parliament, Dismaland, Walled-Off Hotel—and grouped under themes like politics, Brexit, consumption, and protest. Taken together, the breadth of Banksy’s output and the many tough subjects he has tackled, from the surveillance state to the police state to the state of constant war, is impressive. I was heartened to be reminded that he puts his money where his mouth is—raising money to assist women in Greek refugee camps, for example, and converting Dismaland’s building materials into housing for refugees. 
A viewer takes in the Banksy exhibition “Genius or Vandal.” Photo courtesy of Erick Pendzich.
But that made seeing this art in a gigantic, money-minting corporate expo all the more disheartening. Overall, the experience of encountering works that give form to ideas expressed in the street, continents apart, divorced here from their local and temporal context, had the effect of taming them, leaving me feeling as if I were observing one of Banksy’s classic feral rats, bathed, combed, and caged. 
Banksy points out in his book Wall and Piece that rats “exist without permission,” that “if you are dirty, insignificant and unloved, then rats are the ultimate role model.” Fun fact: They can also swim for three days on end. As the skies opened up over New York, sending down a record three inches of rain per hour, I realized that maybe Banksy is right. Maybe we need to learn something from the rats. And that even an unauthorized show about a guerrilla artist has, like these animals, a right to exist.
“Banksy: Genius or Vandal” is currently on view at 526 6th Avenue, New York City. 
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An unauthorized Banksy exhibition in Seoul has come under fire from visitors disappointed that the vast majority of the works on view were reproductions, rather than original works of art by the anonymous British street artist.
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits“—which is currently on view in both Seoul and Warsaw—is slated to travel to the U.S. for the first time next month, arriving in Atlanta before heading to Charlotte and Miami. It’s been touring since its 2016 debut in Istanbul, and has visited 11 countries, reportedly attracting over 1 million visitors.
But it has hit a speed bump during its first stop in Asia.
According to promotional materials for the forthcoming U.S. edition, the show includes “more than 110 of the artist’s works, such as his original art, prints on different kinds of materials, photos, sculptures, and much more. Some of his works have even been reproduced with his stencil technique especially for the exhibition.”
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” in Vienna included this replica of his Bowery Wall mural in New York calling for the release of imprisoned Turkish artist Zehra Doğan. Photo courtesy of “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits.”
But of the 150 artworks on view in Seoul, only 27 are originals, according to the Korea Herald, prompting reviews complaining that “it is a pity that the show did not specify that most of works are replicas.”
“There were some misunderstandings about the exhibition. We are preparing some leaflets that indicate which artworks are original,” Park Bong-su, a senior manager at LMPE Company, the Seoul entertainment agency helping stage the show’s South Korean edition, told the Herald.
The company reportedly sold 25,000 advance tickets, but is now offering refunds for those who no longer wish to attend.
The show does include several original sculptures from Banksy’s 2015 “Dismaland” theme park exhibition in the U.K., as well as authentic prints of Smiling Copper, Consumer Jesus (Christ with Shopping Bags), and Bomb Hugger.
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” in Vienna. Photo courtesy of “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits.”
The reproductions include Laugh Now, a mural from the Ocean Rooms club in Brighton, U.K., showing a monkey and the caption “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.” There is also a version of Banksy’s bathroom, which he decorated with stencils of rats during lockdown in 2020 and shared photographs of online with the note that “My wife hates it when I work from home.”
“Without Limits” is not to be confused with the equally unauthorized “Banksy: Genius or Vandal,” opening next week at a former Urban Outfitters store in downtown Manhattan. That show also has been touring for years, most recently Brussels in June and Los Angeles earlier this month.
A third traveling Banksy outfit, “The Art of Banksy,” has been traversing the globe since its debut in Melbourne in late 2016. Curated by Steve Lazarides, formerly Banksy’s official art dealer, the exhibition proudly trumpets its unauthorized status, and currently claims to showcase $35 million worth of work by the artist.
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” in Vienna included this replica of the artist’s bathroom, painted during lockdown in spring 2020. Photo courtesy of “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits.”
“This exhibition is a one-off—never will you be able to see this amount of work in one place again,” Lazarides claimed ahead of the initial opening. “Once the show is over, the artwork will dissipate back to the other 40 collectors around the world, and the likelihood of them being brought together again in the future is very slim.”
Presumably, the profitability of the project—it charged $30 per ticket at that inaugural exhibition and has reportedly welcomed more than 750,000 guests to date—changed his mind. It opened in Chicago this month, and is headed to San Francisco in November. (It is produced by Starvox Entertainment, which is also behind “Immersive Van Gogh.”)
By the time the show touched down in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018, Lazarides was bragging about how easy it was to reproduce. “You could take this show to every capital city in the world and it could work anywhere. Cab drivers in Karachi know who Banksy is. It could just keep running,” he told Artnet News.
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” in Vienna. Photo courtesy of “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits.”
The works in “The Art of Banksy” are all on loan from private collections and are predominantly screen prints—not the illegal graffiti paintings that invariably captivate the internet whenever they pop up in the wild. In Miami, those artworks “looked limp and poster-like on the big warehouse walls,” wrote Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin.
Recreating some of Banksy’s more famous graffiti works for the exhibition was evidently a way around that problem for the team at “Without Limits.” The exhibition’s website includes the logos for several different companies, including BWO Entertainment, which has offices in New York and London; Expand Entertainment Group, a Saudi Arabian company; and Romanian live entertainment promoters Events. The site also lists Special Entertainment Events (SEE), known for touring shows on topics as varied as King Tut, the Titanic, Star Trek, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (which returns to New York late next month).
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” in Vienna. Photo courtesy of “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits.”
Handling ticket sales is Fever, which is involved with many so-called “experience economy” events—including the “Genius or Vandal” Banksy show in New York. That one is produced by Exhibition Hub, which also partnered with Fever on its “Immersive Van Gogh” knock-off, “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” (Earlier this year, the New York Better Business Bureau issued a warning to consumers who might mistake it for the original Van Gogh animated light show popularized by Emily in Paris, and Artnet News critic Ben Davis found it to be the less impressive of the two.)
None of the companies involved responded to inquiries from Artnet News.
The preponderance of shows has not escaped the notice of the artist himself. “Members of the public should be aware there has been a recent spate of Banksy exhibitions, none of which are consensual,” he wrote on his website. “They’ve been organized entirely without the artist’s knowledge or involvement. Please treat them accordingly.”
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